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A PLAIN GUIDE TO ...
A Liturgical Jesus (Continued)

Jewish Christians gradually moved from the Hebrew fold into the nascent Church. This took them into the company of Greek and Roman Christians. The Jewish Christians brought with them a liturgical pattern of observances which involved Sabbath and festival readings using established Jewish themes and patterns.

Mark's Gospel, to take the earliest gospel as an instance, falls into several major sections. The exact delineation of these sections is still the subject of scholarly strife and will no doubt remain so. One of the more obvious, as an example noted long before Goulder, is the division of Mark's Passion narrative into eight three-hour sections.

But the liturgical patterns in Mark are not confined to the Passion narrative. They appear to be all-embracing. An initial clue is obtained from an early Markan manuscript from the early 5th century called the Codex Alexandrinus. In this book the text of Mark is broken up into 49 numbered and titled units. 

If one places Mark's account of the Passion (Mark 16) to coincide with Easter Sunday a number of startling correlations with the Jewish calendar become apparent. There is an almost perfect fit with Jewish liturgical themes over 49 weeks. 

For example, the book of Deuteronomy was read over twelve Sabbaths in the Jewish cycle. This can be exactly fitted with the sections in Mark which deal with the journey of Jesus and his disciples from Galilee to Jerusalem. During this journey Jesus instructs his disciples about their role in the Christian community. As Spong says,

It is marked by one teaching episode after another: on humility, on divisions within the fellowship, on marriage and divorce, on the care and treatment of children, on wealth" 

and so on.

Again, Mark 13 is the so-called "Little Apocalypse", in which Jesus speaks of the coming of the Messiah and the final fulfillment of God's creation in what's commonly called "the end of the world". If one follows the 49 divisions of the Codex Alexandrinus, this section (which precedes the Passion lesson) falls exactly on the Jewish Sabbath when the theme of the passing of the old and the coming of the new was dealt with.

So close is the correspondence between Mark's liturgical pattern and the Jewish annual lectionary that one is able to predict which week of the Jewish cycle each part of Mark applies to. Having said that, Mark's Gospel covers only roughly two-thirds of the entire cycle.

Goulder and Spong present instance after instance of this sort of correlation. Their conclusion is that Mark's Gospel does not fit any of the patterns previously proposed by scholars. It is a series of lections. The content and themes of these readings was determined by the worship needs of the early Jewish-Christian communities.

Matthew and Luke contain the same liturgical pattern, each reworked in their own way. Remember that both are dated later than Mark. For example, Matthew's Gospel is longer than Mark's because, according to Spong, the author has to compensate for the incompleteness of Mark's Gospel. He supplies the missing material for the rest of the year. 

This comprises mostly the early part of Matthew's Gospel. It covers the missing Jewish Sabbaths from the Passover to Rosh Hashanah and the Pentecost celebration (missing from Mark). It's worth noting that the Codex Alexandrinus version of Matthew contains 69 units with headings and themes (Mark has 49). The entire liturgical year and festivals are thus covered.

Where Mark focuses on the Sabbaths, Matthew focuses more on the festivals. Scholars have long noted that there are five blocks of teaching material in Matthew. It's now apparent that these five blocks fit exactly the five great festivals of the Jewish liturgical year.

Having established a compelling correlation, Spong and Goulder then take a critical next step. They have shown that this Gospel-liturgy is a re-working of Old Testament patterns. It is an output of the Midrash process. As a restatement of Old Testament themes it is not meant to be taken literally. So it is not history and, so they maintain, no amount of analysis will reveal what really happened in the life of Jesus.

The jury is still out on this conclusion. On one hand the shock and horror of the Christian establishments to Goulder's work can be interpreted as a defensive, knee-jerk reaction. On the other, the "I told you so" response of deniers of the historicity of the gospels isn't unexpected.

There are two immediate problems with the outcome of this line of thought:

1. It depends heavily on the conclusion that there was no "Q-source" of either written or oral material drawn on by both Matthew and Luke [1]. This material was probably a good source of pre-liturgical information and interpretation of the life and meaning of Jesus. Matthew and Luke also used Mark's earlier liturgical pattern as a guide. They  modified it and "invented" their own individual liturgical schemes for themselves and their situations. This would account for the distinctive character of each gospel.
   
   It seems to me that there is very weighty evidence for the existence of a "Q-source". It was probably oral in origin. Linguistic similarities and other quirks in the shared material make it highly likely that it was used by the authors of Matthew and Luke.
   
   If this is so, and I for one think it is, then there's every reason to think that the authors of both gospels rearranged common material to suit themselves. Each gospel has material unique to itself. Each author used the Midrash method to work out their own liturgical pattern for their own situation.
   
   That they did this doesn't necessarily mean that there is no history in the Q-source material they both used. Not only doesn't this follow logically, but the bulk of the evidence goes against this conclusion.

2. There is little doubt in my mind that the liturgical context of the Synoptic Gospels will gradually be accepted, and rightly so.
   
   But does that change anything? I don't think so. No matter how the gospels are perceived - as myth, or lectionary, or wisdom literature, or catechetical material, or polemics or whatever - the central question remains: how much of their material is good history, an account of what really happened?
   
   In other words, the end use of the gospels is only one matter at issue. Perhaps that use was, as it were, multi-purpose - worship, teaching and debate among them. The gospel material seems highly likely to have been assembled in various sequences to meet liturgical purposes, as Goulder and Spong propose.
   
   However, then as now, liturgy had a primary underlying purpose - to acquaint the faithful with the story of Jesus as illuminated and informed by the precedent of the Old Testament (the Scriptures of the New Testament).

To sum up:

• Analysis by Goulder and others of the three Synoptic Gospels reveals that they were written primarily for liturgical use in the Jewish religious year as followed by early Jewish-Christian communities.

• Mark's Gospel doesn't cover the entire year. The longer gospels of Matthew and Luke expand to cover the full year and festivals. They are designed to meet the needs of the communities of which their authors were part.

• The correspondence between the Synoptic Gospels and the Jewish liturgical year uncovered by Goulder is compellingly comprehensive. But this new insight is not yet accepted by traditional Christianity - if it ever will be.

• The case for denying the historicity of the entire contents of the gospels is weak. Parts of all three Synoptic Gospels undoubtedly relate back to very early oral and written sources. A slim but adequate historical Jesus emerges from these parts.

• That the three Synoptic Gospels are written to be used in the annual religious liturgical cycle does not invalidate the quest for the Jesus of history. A real man actually lived about whom we know something as a matter of good history. It is upon the real man that Christianity is based.

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[1]   See The "Q" Source 

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